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SCIENCE NEWS MAGAZINE

SOCIETY FOR SCIENCE & THE PUBLIC

MAY 31, 2014

INTO THE

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 VOL. 185 | NO. 11
Science News
News
6 The MERS outbreak
gains speed, topping 500
cases, including twointhe
United States.
8 No Dorian Gray portrait
required: Young blood
rejuvenates old brains,
10 With nearly perfect
according to three mouse
studies.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ANDI ANSHARI/AP PHOTO; WORLOSWILDLIFEWONDERS/SHUTTERSTOCK; RMl/NIAID
9 An ancient episode of
global warming may have
ended thanks to ocean
microbes' taste for dead
phytoplankton.
11 Turkana Boy, a famous
A rare gravitational
lens in paired stars may
reveal exotic properties.
control over qubits, 12 Drongos borrow other
scientists move toward
error-free quantum
computing.
13 A tiny cave louse
14 News in Brief
Features
i6 The Mysterious Boundary
COVER STORY A debate has arisen over whether
an astronaut passing a black hole’s point of no return
would get stretched to death or flash-fried. Resolving
the controversy may lead to new insights about
gravity and more. By Andrew Grant
22 Big Babies
Weighing more than about 9 pounds at birth
increases a person's lifetime risk of obesity, diabetes,
heart disease, cancer and perhaps even neurological
problems. By Nathan Seppa
Slacker dads drive frogs
to hatch early.
Homo erectus specimen,
still incites controversy
30 years after the
skeleton’s discovery.
Departments
species’ warning sounds
2 EDITOR'S NOTE
and freshen up their
4 NOTEBOOK
food-stealingfraud.
Upside-down sloths have
With a little help from
to hold their organs up
implanted pig tissue, and theirfood down.
muscles regrow in
severely injured people. 28 REVIEWS & PREVIEWS
The National Museum
of Mathematics gets
harbors a big secret: rambunctious with math.
the most penislike
30 FEEDBACK
organ discovered on
afemaleanimal. 32 SCIENCE VISUALIZED
A computer simulation
lets scientists watch how
Lectures are memorable
the universe has evolved.
for students who
take notes with pens,
"Romneycare" saved
lives in Massachusetts,
fingerprints glow red
thanks to a new polymer,
and more.
www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 1
EDITOR'S NOTE

One of the best ways for kids to learn science: by doing it

A biodegradable Band-Aid. A low-cost,
ultrasonic guide to parallel parking.
A reinvention of the toilet. These were
among the nearly 1,400 science fair proj¬
ects on display at the 2014 Intel Inter¬
national Science and Engineering Fair.
Science News’ parent organization, the
Society for Science & the Public, has run
the annual event since 1950. This year’s
fair brought a record-breaking number of student finalists to
compete in Los Angeles. And that’s where I found myself in
mid-May as this issue of the magazine was going to press.
My first day there, I had to dodge teen scientists using yards
of double-sided tape to affix posters to three-panel boards;
a congregation from Team Brazil (clad in green-and-yellow
jackets) practicing science spiels with the same intensity as
any sports warm-up; and, as one might expect with an event
for high-schoolers, lots of socializing.
On our Science News for Students website (www.science
newsforstudents.org), you can read about a few of the many
fascinating projects. A trio from Dix Hills, N.Y., focused on
trapping bedbugs. Polystyrene recycled from a Styrofoam cof¬
fee cup proved the best material to immobilize a hairy bedbug
leg. An Iraqi girl studied whether infrared light could be used
to counter movie piracy. A team from Hanoi showed that plant
compounds called saponins, extracted from a by-product of
fiber production, could help keep fresh fruits from spoiling.
Some of the projects, though done by young folk, would not
be terribly out of place in the pages of Science News. Many
are sophisticated, if somewhat incremental, and engage in an
ongoing scientific conversation. Others are more idiosyncratic
— questions you can imagine a 16-year-old asking and trying
to answer. All show the benefits of getting kids involved in
original research. I couldn’t walk down an aisle of the exhibi¬
tion hall in the L.A. Convention Center without learning at
least one new thing. There’s no way that the students pro¬
ducing these projects didn’t learn a huge amount, both about
doing science and about how to communicate the results in
a clear and compelling way. Budding scientists need both.
Tune in next issue to find out about this year’s winners.
I’m sure that you, like me, will find their enthusiasm and
ingenuity inspiring. — Eva Emerson, Editor in Chief

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, INTERIM Rick Bates BOARD OF TRUSTEES FACILITIES Paul Roger
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2 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014

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NOTEBOOK

Excerpt from the

May 30,1964, issue
of Science News Letter

50 YEARS AGO

Size of Universe
Studied
The universe is much big¬
ger than scientists thought
as little as 15 years ago. Dr.
Ira S. Bowen, director of Mt.
Wilson and Palomar Obser¬
vatories, said. It is billions
of light years in size as seen
from the earth, exactly how
big even astronomers can
not yet say. The amount of
space and matter the world’s
largest telescope, the giant SCIENCE STATS
200-inch atop Mt. Palomar,
can see is so great that how
Fly more, live longer
the universe is put together Larger animals tend to live longer than smaller ones, but a new study finds some
should soon be known.... interesting exceptions to the rule. Some species live far longer than expected based
Before the 200-inch went on their size, and an examination of their lifestyles reveals that the most important
into operation, the most factor linked to longer life is the ability to fly. Many birds and bats have long lives for
distant objects in the heav¬ their size, but the effect depends on what time of day the animals are active. Being
ens were thought to be only nocturnal or diurnal gives the biggest life span boost compared with being active at
hundreds of millions of light dawn and dusk, when more predators may be out. source: k. healy etauproc. royal soc. b 2014

years away.
Maximum life spans of animals, by weight

UPDATE: Data from the

Hubble space telescope in the

FROM TOP: WORLDSWILDLIFEWONDERS/SHUTTERSTOCK; S. EGTS

1990s revealed more about Brandt’s bat Andean condor
the size of the observable uni¬ 7 grams 10,500 grams
verse, and since then NASA's
WMAP satellite has detected
light from 13.8 billion light-
years away. No one knows,
though, whether the universe
is infinitely large, or even if
what has been observed is the
only universe that exists. Forest shrew Emu African elephant
17.5 grams 38,925 grams 4,800,000 grams

I-‘-1-*-1—

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80
Longevity (years)

4 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014

 IT'S ALIVE
Upside down and
can’t throw up
A sloth can’t vomit. It has a one-way
throat, handy for eating while dan¬
gling upside down by the toes. But the
animal has to be careful not to poison
itself by nibbling too many toxic leaves
that it can’t easily purge.
There are upsides and downsides to
evolving a body that can hang toes-up
for some four to six hours a day, as the
three-fingered sloth does, says sloth
biologist Rebecca Cliffe of the Sloth
Sanctuary of Costa Rica near Limon.
She calls her sloths “three-fingered”
instead of the more common “three¬
toed” because all sloths, even so-called
two-toed species, actually have three
A baby three-fingered sloth has to cling tight
to mom. Baby sloths are born among the
branches and can grip and clamber right away.
THE-EST
Oldest flying reptile
Deep beneath an ash bed in an area of north¬
west China famed for mud-filled “dinosaur
death pits,” researchers have unearthed the
oldest pterodactyl fossil ever discovered.
The ancient flying reptile has been named
Kryptodrakon progenitor, or “hidden serpent
first-born,” for its discovery near the filming
site for the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon. It lived about 163 million years ago,
pushing back the fossil record for this type
of pterosaur by more than 5 million years to
the boundary between the middle and late
Jurassic period.
Researchers pieced together fragile fossil
fragments of Kryptodrakon’s spindly skel¬
eton, which once belonged to an adult with
a wingspan of 1.47 meters, about as long as
B. ANDRES ET AL/CURRENT BIOLOGY 2014
a bicycle, Brian Andres of the University
of South Florida in Tampa and colleagues
report April 24 in Current Biology.
Though petite, this winged reptile is the
ancestor of what would eventually become
the largest flying animals ever to soar over
the Earth, some reaching more than 10
meters in wingspan. — Meghan Rosen
See video of Rebecca Cliffe answering sloth questions at bit.ly/SNsloth
toes on their hind legs. It’s the digits of
the front limbs, the fingers, that number
either two or three.
One reason both two- and three-
fingered sloths have ended up up-ended
is that it helps them carry out their
fastidious grooming for several hours
a day. “They like to scratch with both
hands,” Cliffe says.
Three-fingered sloths practice an
extreme slothful vegetarianism that
can call for topsy-turvy dining. Their
digestive systems can’t cope with much
fruit or root material, so they snag
tender new leaves, sometimes easier
to reach from an upside-down perch.
Those new leaves may be less likely to
deploy a full arsenal of plant-defense
toxins that the vomitless sloths can’t
get rid of, Cliffe says.
Eating upside down is one thing,
but breathing is another. Gravity can
pull heavy organs down onto the dia¬
phragm. A brown-throated sloth’s gut
(Bradypus variegatus), for instance,
can store up to a third of the animal’s
body weight in wastes before the
weekly (or so) bathroom trip to the
forest floor. The gut and other heavy
organs are held in place by a web of
membranes and internal adhesions,
Cliffe and her colleagues report in
the April Biology Letters. Breathing
easier saves up to 8.6 percent of a sloth’s
notoriously tight daily energy budget.
Exploring sloth organs during nec¬
ropsies, Cliffe and the sanctuary staff
at first thought the bits of webbing and
adhesions were caused by old injuries.
But the “scar tissues” kept turning up
in the same places, such as connecting
the liver and stomach to the rib cage.
Now Cliffe and her colleagues are
looking at the sloths’ upside-down
circulatory systems. They don’t know
yet, she says, why blood doesn’t rush
to a sloth’s upside-down head.
— Susan Milius
Fossil fragments
(above) of the
flying reptile
Kryptodrakon
progenitor were
uncovered in
China's Xinjiang
region (left), known
for Jurassic mud
pits that snared all
sorts of prehistoric
creatures.
www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 5
GENES & CELLS

MERS outbreak picks up pace

In recent weeks, virus infected hundreds, including two U.S. cases

BY TINA HESMAN SAEY
More than two years after it first
appeared, the Middle East Respiratory
Syndrome virus has suddenly exploded,
with more than 200 new cases in April.
As doctors struggle to treat patients,
scientists are rushing to answer some
basic questions about the virus’s biology,
whose answers could stop the outbreak
from becoming a pandemic.
As far as anyone knows, the first
human victims of MERS were a univer¬
sity student and a nurse who got sick and
died in Jordan in the spring of 2012. In
the two years between then and March
2014, public health officials recorded a
total of207 cases. Of those cases, 93 peo¬
ple died, making the mortality rate about
45 percent.
“If you do the math on the mortality
rate of the virus and the number of peo¬
ple on the planet, it’s scary,” says Ralph
Baric, a virologist at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who has
long studied coronaviruses, including
MERS and its cousin SARS.
The situation has rapidly worsened.
In April 2014, the MERS virus infected
at least 261 people — more than in the
previous two years combined —and
killed 38, mostly in Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates. Those countries
have been focal points of the disease
since early in the outbreak. The first two
documented cases in the United States
were announced on May 2 and May 12;
the patients are both health care workers
a team in Saudi Arabia attempting to
determine why MERS has begun to
spread so rapidly, says WHO spokes¬
person Tarik Jasarevic. Scientists have
already ruled out one possibility: “There
is absolutely no evidence that the virus
has changed,” he says.
Part of the mystery is that no one is
certain how people become infected,
Jasarevic says. Camels and bats have
been found to carry related viruses,
with camels regarded as the most likely
source for human infections.
Now, researchers have discovered
that dromedary camels carry live MERS
viruses in their noses that can infect pri¬
mate cells. Thomas Briese, a virologist at
Columbia University, and his colleagues
report the finding April 29 in mBio. Pre¬
vious studies had hinted that the drom¬
edaries could carry MERS (SN: 4/5/14,
p. 8), but fell short of demonstrating that
the animals have live viruses that can
transmit to humans.
Camels can’t be blamed for all MERS
cases. Many people who have fallen ill
were city dwellers who had no contact
300 -i Numbers on the rise After new case numbers
remained low for two years, the MERS outbreak
increased rapidly in April.
250-
SOURCE: EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR DISEASE PREVENTION AND CONTROL
y. 200
i/i
<u
u
150
<D
-Q
£
100
with camels, Briese The MERS virus
says. And if the ani¬ (yellow) was
unknown two
mals were the primary years ago. Now
source, he says, one it has infected
might expect camel at least 538
people in 16
handlers or people countries.
who work at slaugh¬
terhouses or otherwise have intense
contact with camels and their bodily flu¬
ids to be the people who get MERS most
often. But that’s not the case, Briese says.
Instead, the virus most often attacks
the old and already sick. Scientists are
trying to determine what makes some
people susceptible. Also unclear is
exactly how the virus makes the leap
from camel to human. Briese and his col¬
leagues are testing camel meat, milk and
urine as possible sources of the virus.
The method of transmission is just
one of the fundamental questions that
scientists have yet to answer about
MERS. Researchers have learned that
the virus uses a protein on its surface,
known as the spike protein, to pick a par¬
ticular molecular lock and gain access
to human cells. The lock is a protein

who recently traveled from Saudi Arabia

(SN Online: 5/2/14, 5/5/14, 5/12/14). By 50-
mid-May, the world’s case total was 538,
according to the U.S. Centers for Disease i—i—i—i—i—i—i— r
RML/NIAID

02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 01 02 03 04
Control and Prevention. 1-2012-1-2013-L -2014-
The World Health Organization has Month of onset

6 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014

 known as dipeptidyl peptidase 4, or
DPP4, that sits on the surfaces of cells United Kingdom 4

(SN Online: 3/13/13). Manyspecies make Germany 2 Kuwait 3

a version of DPP4; the MERS virus can l
crack a limited number of those, includ¬
ing the versions made by humans, camels France 2 - Qatar 7
and bats. It can’t get past the DPP4
Italy 1 |v
locks on the surfaces of cells from mice, United Arab
rats or ferrets, says Vincent Munster, a Greece 1 X Emirates 49

virologist at the National Institutes of

Health’s Rocky Mountain Laboratories
in Hamilton, Mont.
That’s a problem, because it means
those laboratory favorites can’t be
experimentally infected with MERS.
Munster and his colleagues discovered
that the coronavirus can infect rhesus
monkeys. But the monkeys don’t com¬
pletely mimic the human infection,
Munster says, and “not that many labs
can handle nonhuman primates.”
The problem of finding a useful ani¬
mal MERS model maybe partially solved
thanks to a team led by Stanley Perlman,
a virologist at the University of Iowa in
Iowa City. Perlman and his colleagues
devised a way to get mice to temporarily
produce the human version of DPP4 in
their respiratory tracts, the researchers
reported in the April 1 Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.
Mice with human DPP4 can be
infected with MERS, enabling the
researchers to learn how the immune
system handles the virus. Perlman’s
group is now genetically engineering
mice to permanently replace their DPP4
protein with the human version.
Other potentially good news sur¬
faced when two groups of researchers
reported April 28 in the Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences and
in the April 30 Science Translational
Medicine that they had isolated human
REDMAL/ISTOCKPHOTO. ADAPTED BY E. OTWELL
r*
Egyptl Philippines 1
Tunisia 3
Jordan 6 !
Oman 2
.<-.
Malaysia 1
(United
States 2) Yemen 1
J
Saudi Arabia 411
A moving target The MERS outbreak has centered on the Middle East, but travelers have
carried the respiratory virus to many other countries. The numbers represent cases documented
through May 6 in each country, with the exception of the United States, which saw its second
case later in May. source: European centre for disease prevention and control
human immune systems can keep the all, Jasarevic says, and the virus rarely
MERS virus in check, Marasco says. Dur¬ transmits beyond the second person
ing the course of the experiments, the infected.
virus sometimes developed mutations That’s an assertion that Trish Perl, an
in its spike protein, allowing MERS to epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Uni¬
evade the antibodies. “In cases where versity, challenges. Perl traveled to Saudi
viruses could escape, they did so at Arabia last year to investigate a large
the expense of their own fitness,” says MERS outbreak at hospitals. Her team
Marasco. The mutated viruses either found evidence for long chains of per-
had a harder time grasping cells, which son-to-person transmission of the virus,
would make infection harder, or they especially among dialysis patients (SN
grew less well in primate cells. Weak¬ Online: 6/19/13). “It’s clear that there is
ened viruses may be easy pickings for a a lot going on in the health care environ¬
strong immune system. ment,” Perl says.
Unfortunately, many people who have In recent weeks, health officials have
contracted MERS already had other ill¬ reported a growing number of milder
nesses that may have damaged their cases and cases with no symptoms. Some
ability to fight the virus. Each infected may have been detected thanks to better
person is like a test tube where the virus surveillance; mild cases may have been
can mutate; having more test tubes missed earlier. The growing number of
means an ever-increasing chance that milder cases has also lowered the virus’s
the virus could become better at grow¬ overall mortality rate to somewhere
ing in humans. “A weakened immune around 30 percent. That’s still a fright¬

antibodies that could prevent the MERS
virus from latching on to its target.
The discovery raises the possibility
that the antibodies could treat MERS
infections or protect health care work¬
ers or close contacts of MERS patients
from infection, says Wayne Marasco, an
immunologist at Harvard Medical School
and a coauthor of one of the reports.
The study also suggests that healthy
system is clearly consistent with an envi¬
ronment where adaptation can occur,”
says Marasco.
Many of the new cases in Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates have been
spread from a sick person to a health
care worker, family member, hospital
patient or another contact. People who
caught the virus from someone else tend
to have mild illnesses or no symptoms at
ening number, Perlman says, but “it’s not
as scary as it could be.”
He sees MERS as primarily a camel
cold virus that sometimes leaps into
susceptible people; proper precautions,
he says, may make it disappear. “If you
have good infection control measures
and people stop getting so close to sick
camels, there’s a good chance it will
die out.” ■

www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 7

NEWS
BODY & BRAIN
Young blood proven good for old brain
Plasma component restores some of youth's vibrancy
BY LAURA SANDERS
Vampires knew it all along, but now sci¬
entists have discovered that young blood
can keep an old brain sharp. Plasma or
blood from a young mouse — or even a
single protein from plasma —rejuve¬
nates sluggish bodies and minds in a host
of ways, three new studies find.
Throughout the ages, people have
searched far and wide for an elixir that
replenishes the body. “Maybe they
were just looking too far,” says Tony
Wyss-Coray of Stanford University
School of Medicine, coau¬
thor of a May 4 study in
Nature Medicine.
Young blood recharges
old neurons, improving
mice’s ability to learn
and remember things,
Wyss-Coray and col¬
leagues found. Two other
papers, appearing May 4
Young blood spurs the
in Science, identified a growth of blood vessels (green)
particular ingredient in in the brains of old mice, as
young blood that improves shown in a 3-D reconstruction
of microscope images.
both brain and muscles.
Scientists had already found benefits
of young plasma for other tissues, such
as the heart, liver and pancreas. Finding
that the brain can be refreshed too may
point out ways to counter age-related
declines, either with plasma from young
people or drugs made to mimic impor¬
tant parts of it, scientists say.
That the elderly brain can be rescued
suggests that cognitive decline with
aging may be avoidable, says Lee Rubin
of Harvard University, coauthor of one of
the Science papers. “It’s not a unilateral
descent into complete degeneration in
an inexorable kind of way.”
The premise of the experiments was
deceptively simple: Scientists surgically
linked the circulatory system of an old
mouse to that of a young one, allowing
their blood to mingle. In earlier experi¬
ments, Wyss-Coray and colleagues had
found that this surgery to make mouse
8 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
Siamese twins is bad for the young
mouse. Ingredients in old blood harm
the young mouse’s brain, the research¬
ers reported in 2011.
This time around, he and his col¬
leagues looked for benefits that young
blood might confer on older mice.
In the experiment, 18-month-old
mice — the rodent equivalent of about
a 55- to 70-year-old person —were
tethered to 3-month-old mice, the equiv¬
alent of about a 20- to 30-year-old. The
infusion of young blood kicked off a cas¬
cade of changes in the
behavior of genes impor¬
tant for neuron behav¬
ior, the team found. And
the neurons themselves
appeared to sprout more
docking places for other
neurons to connect, a
property of healthy neu¬
rons in young brains.
These changes weren’t
present in old mice that
had been surgically con¬
nected to other old mice.
Directly injecting old mice with
plasma from young mice created ben¬
efits too — no surgery required. After
receiving intravenous injections of
young plasma eight times over 24 days,
old mice were better at remembering
the location of a hidden platform and
responded more strongly to a scary
environment, compared with old mice
that had received injections of plasma
from other old mice. No improvements
occurred when the plasma was heated
before it was injected, a process that can
destroy sensitive proteins.
In a different experiment that con¬
nected mouse circulatory systems,
Rubin and colleagues found that young
blood increases the rate of cell birth in a
brain region of the mouse called the sub-
ventricular zone. This region gives birth
to cells that help a mouse smell. Old mice
surgically linked to a young mouse were
better able to discriminate odors.
The benefits weren’t restricted to
the smell system. Rubin and colleagues
found blood vessels remodeled in a way
that boosts flow. “The increase in blood
vessels and blood flow is all over the
brain, so we think that there will be other
benefits to the older brain,” he says.
Rubin thinks that the positive effects
of young blood probably last several
weeks. “Maybe you wouldn’t have to be
a Dracula feeding on fresh blood every
day.” (Here’s another way vampires
might have gone wrong: The beneficial
molecules probably wouldn’t survive
a trip through the digestive system,
Wyss-Coray says.)
Of course, there would be no need
to drain blood from young donors (or
victims) if the key ingredients could be
isolated. The Science studies identify
one such contender: a protein called
GDF11, which normally declines with
age. Delivering this molecule partially
mimicked some of the gains in the brain,
Rubin and colleagues found, and in skel¬
etal muscle, as described in a paper by
Amy Wagers of Harvard Medical School
and colleagues.
In the brain, GDF11 alone remodeled
brain blood vessels and enhanced the
birthrate of new cells in the subventric-
ular zone, Rubin’s team found. But it’s
unlikely that GDF11 acts alone. A reduc¬
tion of harmful ingredients in old blood
may also be important, Rubin says.
“All of these studies concentrate on
what’s being enhanced,” says immuno¬
therapy expert Dobri Kiprov of California
Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco.
“What they address to a much lesser
extent is what’s being removed.” Inflam¬
matory molecules that rise with age may
be important to consider, he says.
One day, designed molecules may
stave off decline in the entire body. But
much more work needs to be done to
reach that point. Moving the research
into human experiments will be difficult,
but Wyss-Coray has started a biotech¬
LIDA KATSIMPARDI
nology company, Alkahest, and plans
to test the effects of plasma from young
donors on people with Alzheimer’s dis¬
ease. He hopes to start in a few months. ■
 EARTHS ENVIRONMENT

Ocean bacteria may have shut off ancient global warming

Mineral spikes in seafloor sediments coincide with halt in temperature rise

BY GABRIEL POPKIN The amount of carbon-containing

Ocean bacteria may have vacuumed up
carbon and halted a period of extreme
warmth some 56 million years ago,
according to a study published April 13
in Nature Geoscience.
The finding suggests how Earth might
once have rapidly reversed a runaway
greenhouse effect. However, rapidity is
relative: The bacteria would be far too
slow to head off today’s human-caused
climate impacts.
The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Max¬
imum was a hot episode that occurred
around 55.9 million years ago. During
the roughly 170,000-year span, atmo¬
spheric carbon dioxide levels soared,
temperatures rose by 5 degrees Celsius
or more and ocean acidity spiked. The
event ended in a relative hurry, over
the course of 30,000 to 40,000 years.
Scientists are unsure what stopped the
warming; possibilities include uptake of
carbon by organisms or by rock.
To investigate organisms’ role. Uni¬
versity of California, Santa Cruz marine
scientist Adina Paytan and colleagues
measured how much of the mineral
barite, or barium sulfate, was present in
12 seafloor sediment cores from around
the globe. Oceanic bacteria produce bar¬
ite when they break down dead phyto¬
plankton that has fallen from surface
waters; the barite then accumulates in
sediment.
Paytan’s team found that barite spiked
globally during the Paleocene-Eocene
Thermal Maximum. The research¬
ers think the elevated barite resulted
from more phytoplankton falling from
the ocean surface and being consumed
by bacteria during the warm period.
The phytoplankton that the microbes
munched probably absorbed more
carbon from the atmosphere as tem¬
peratures and carbon dioxide levels
matter falling to the deep ocean
increased during an extraordinarily
warm period around 56 million
years ago, researchers argue. In this
computer simulation of the oceans
at the time, red indicates high levels
of falling carbon-rich material and
green indicates low amounts.
increased. The bacteria could have
removed enough carbon from the atmo¬
sphere for long enough to reverse global
warming, the authors conclude.
Using barite records is “a really cre¬
ative, cool way to visualize these bio¬
geochemical processes,” says Aradhna
Tripati, a geologist at UCLA. But she
questions the researchers’ assumption
that bacteria in the much warmer ocean
of 56 million years ago captured carbon
at rates similar to today’s.
While the finding suggests oceanic
bacteria could play a role in stopping
human-caused climate warming, the
microbes would take thousands of years,
says team member and Wesleyan Uni¬
versity environmental scientist Ellen
Thomas. “Humans can’t wait for this.” ■

ATOM & COSMOS

White dwarf boosts light of companion

Astronomers have discovered a unique pair of stars consisting of a white
dwarf, the compact core of a dead star, and the sunlike star it orbits.
When it passes between its companion and Earth, the white dwarfs
FROM TOP: Z. MA ET AL/NATURE GEOSCIENCE 2014; JPL-CALTECH/NASA

gravity magnifies the other star’s light (shown in an artist’s illustration).

The pair represents the first clear sign of a gravitational lens in a binary
star. The white dwarf — with a mass about 60 percent of the sun’s and
a volume not much bigger than Earth’s — orbits its companion every
88 days, astronomers report in the April 18 Science. Ethan Kruse and
Eric Agol of the University of Washington in Seattle discovered the binary,
lurking 2,600 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, while mining
data collected by the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope. Self-lensing
binaries provide a rare opportunity to directly measure masses of stars
that otherwise could not be measured. Doing so might help scientists
unravel the exotic physics of white dwarfs and the evolution of binaries,
which make up nearly 40 percent of the sunlike stars in the galaxy.
- Christopher Crockett

Watch a video of a white dwarf contorting light at bit.ly/SN_lens www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 9
NEWS

MATTER & ENERGY

In search of the unflappable qubit

Stable quantum information could speed calculations

BY GABRIEL POPKIN in a checkerboard could overcome this

Quantum computing has overcome
an important barrier: Scientists have
achieved nearly perfect control over a
bit of quantum information in away that
could bring them a step closer to error-
free calculations.
All digital information comes in tiny
packets called bits. In consumer devices,
bits flip between two distinct states. But
thanks to quantum weirdness, certain
minuscule objects called quantum bits,
or qubits, can exist in two states at once.
Physicists have connected multiple
qubits with each other to share one over¬
all “entangled” state. Using entangle¬
ment, rudimentary quantum computers
can run multiple calculations at once
and solve simple problems like factoring
15 into 3 and 5 (SN: 3/10/12, p. 26). Each
additional qubit doubles a device’s pro¬
cessing power, so quantum computers
should complete tasks far more rapidly
than conventional machines do.
But quantum states are easily shat¬
tered, especially as the number of entan¬
gled qubits increases. Theorists in the
1990s suggested that qubits arranged
fragility by monitoring and correcting
errors in their neighbors, creating com¬
munal stability. Even in this scheme,
however, individual qubits’ states would
need to come out correctly after at least
99 out of 100 state-changing computa¬
tions; otherwise, errors would multiply
throughout the grid.
Seeking to make an unflappable qubit,
John Martinis, a physicist at the Univer¬
sity of California, Santa Barbara, and
colleagues report in the April 24 Nature
that they built electrical circuits, each
roughly the size of a grain of sand, from
superconducting aluminum wire and
ultrathin barriers of aluminum oxide.
When cooled to 30 thousandths of a
degree Celsius above absolute zero, elec¬
trons slosh back and forth, or resonate,
around the circuits without resistance.
Information can be encoded in this reso¬
nance to make a qubit.
Using the grid-computing idea.
Martinis and colleagues lined up five of
their qubits and electrically linked each
to its nearest neighbors. The researchers
then etched larger circuits that allowed
Tiny electrical circuits have given physicists
unprecedented control over the quantum
states of units of information called qubits.
The circuits appear as five crosses (center).
them to change individual qubits’ states
with tiny pulses of electricity. The sci¬
entists found they could control one
qubit’s state more than 99.9 percent of
the time. For two entangled neighboring
qubits, the fidelity dropped to 99.4 per¬
cent. When the team entangled all five at
once, the researchers could control the
qubits’ state 81.7 percent of the time.
Achieving such precise control in a
system with so many qubits is “a great
milestone for quantum information
processing,” says physicist Raymond
Laflamme of the University of Waterloo
in Canada. And Yale University’s Robert
Schoelkopf, who invented the sloshing-
electron qubit, agrees. But he adds that
a practical quantum computer would
require even stabler qubits. ■

LIFE & EVOLUTION

Abandoned frog eggs can hatch early

If deadbeat dads among frogs shirk their parental duties, neglected egg clutches
can respond by hatching early.
Eggs laid on the undersides of leaves by the glass frogs Hyalinobatmchium
fleischmanni (shown) depend entirely on fathers for care. And, says Jesse Delia
f* of Boston University, “some are just bad dads.”
Males keep the eggs hydrated by releasing water to an egg clutch over the
1 )
FROM TOP: ERIK LUCERO/UCSB; COURTESY OF J. DELIA

course of about 40 minutes. A diligent dad may make five or six water trips a night.
V "v: But he also has to fight off rivals and court the mothers of his next egg batches.
•w
f Embryos neglected in his crowded schedule can eventually hatch early if they’ve
had at least three days of care, Delia and his colleagues report in the June 22
Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Clutches hatched successfully as early as 12 days
after being laid. Well-tended clutches take up to 27 days. The link between
abandonment and early hatching shows up in the frogs’ natural behavior in
southern Mexico and in experiments in which researchers removed dads.
Hatching early saves the embryos from drying out in their eggs but may not
give them the best start to life outside the egg. -Susan Milius

10 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014

 AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGISTS, CALGARY, ALBERTA, APRIL 8-12
HUMANS & SOCIETY
Row arises over Homo erectus height
Doubt over whether Turkana Boy could have hit modern stature
BY BRUCE BOWER
A Stone Age boy stands at the center of a
controversy over when members of the
human evolutionary family first reached
heights and weights comparable to those
of modern human adults.
All that remains of the ancient,
approximately 8-year-old Homo erectus
boy is his nearly complete roughly
1.5-million-year-old skeleton. Excava¬
tions in 1984 near Kenya’s Lake Turkana
yielded the find.
When he died, “Turkana Boy” stood
roughly 5 feet, 3 inches. A study from
1993 estimated that, had the boy lived,
he would have grown to a height of 6
feet, 1 inch. To reach such a height, the
boy would have to have been destined
for an adolescent growth spurt on par
with modern humans’. And a transition
to humanlike growth and development
would have to have occurred surpris¬
ingly early in hominid evolution.
New comparisons of Turkana Boy’s
teeth with those of modern chimpan¬
zees and gorillas at various ages indi¬
cate that the child would have reached
an adult height of 5 feet, 9 inches to 5
feet, 11 inches, reported Christopher
Ruff on April 10. That estimate should
be seen as a minimum, said
Ruff, of the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medi¬
cine. In his view, Turkana Boy
demonstrates that H. erectus
took a major step toward the
extended developmental
period of modern humans.
Ruff’s work revises down¬
ward only slightly the esti¬
mate that he and Alan Walker
of Penn State University pro-
NIEL R/FLICKR (CC BY-NC 2.0)
Clashing analyses conclude
that 1.5-million-year-old
Turkana Boy, whose nearly
complete skeleton was found
in 1984, would have grown
to nearly 6 feet tall or reached
only about 5 feet, 4 inches.
posed over 20 years ago. However, the
earlier conclusion rested on the assump¬
tion that H. erectus grew much as mod¬
ern humans do, getting considerably
taller and heavier during adolescence.
Now, researchers assume that H.
erectus growth patterns fell somewhere
between those of Homo sapiens and rela¬
tively faster-developing chimps. A team
led by Ronda Graves, then at Florida
Atlantic University in Boca Raton, esti¬
mated in the November 2010 Journal
of Human Evolution that Turkana Boy
would have reached an adult height of
5 feet, 4 inches, just a tick taller than
when he died. That analysis hinged on
growth curves calculated to lie between
those of modern humans and chimps.
But between 8 years of age and matu¬
rity, even chimps get considerably taller
and heavier than Graves and her col¬
leagues say Turkana Boy did, Ruff said,
a sign that Graves’ team underestimated
adolescent growth in H. erectus.
Ruff concluded that Turkana Boy’s
height would have fallen within the
range of previously estimated heights
of adult H. erectus individuals derived
from 1.5-million-year-old footprints in
Kenya (SN: 3/28/09, p. 14).
In a new set of growth
curves for Turkana Boy pre¬
sented on April 10, Debo¬
rah Cunningham of Texas
State University in San Mar¬
cos—a coauthor of Graves’
2010 paper — reaffirmed
that the child would have
been shorter as an adult than
Ruff’s estimate and would
have weighed between 138
and 147 pounds.
Bernard Wood of George
Washington University in
Washington, D.C., com¬
mented that he didn’t
understand why Ruff’s and
Cunningham’s growth esti¬
mates diverge so greatly. ■
MEETING NOTES
Laetoli footprints show
signs of unusual gait
Hominids that left footprints in
volcanic ash at Laetoli, Tanzania,
3.6 million years ago walked differ¬
ently than people today do, Kevin
Hatala, an anthropologist at George
Washington University in Washing¬
ton, D.C., reported on April 11. His
conclusion challenges a recent study
suggesting that Laetoli folk took hu¬
manlike strides (SN Online: 3/22/10).
Hatala compared measures of the
depth and shape of Laetoli prints
with similar measures of footprints
made in moist soil by men from a
Tanzanian community of herders
and farmers who rarely wear shoes.
Ancient Laetoli individuals flexed
their big toes more when pushing
off and extended their hips less than
the African men did, Hatala said.
- Bruce Bower
Earliest case of a battered
child found in Greece
A pit where Athenians living 2,200
years ago often deposited fetuses
and babies who had died of natural
causes contained a grim surprise
for Maria Liston, an anthropolo¬
gist at the University of Waterloo
in Canada. There, she found the
skeleton of a roughly 1-year-old
child who was probably beaten to
death before being thrown into
the pit. The unfortunate youngster
represents the earliest documented
case of severe child abuse, Liston
said on April 10. The battered child’s
remains include a partially healed
skull fracture probably caused by
a deliberate blow to the head that
the youngster survived for about a
week. Other abuse markers include
fractures to ribs and at the front
and back of the jaw, irregular bone
growth due to leg and neck injuries
and a break at the end of the upper
arm bone that is usually caused by
violent twisting. — Bruce Bower
www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 11
NEWS
LIFE & EVOLUTION
Mimicry lets birds keep cheating
Drongos borrow other species’ sounds to freshen up their fraud
BY SUSAN MILIUS
Avian masters of deception mix things
up to keep their scam going, researchers
have found.
When food gets scarce, African birds
called fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus
adsimilis) watch for a meerkat or other
forager to find desirable prey. The
drongo calls out an alarm as if a preda¬
tor were approaching. The forager often
drops its prize and dashes away. Then
the drongo swoops in and steals lunch.
If drongos faked one alarm too often,
victims could learn to ignore it, says Tom
Flower of the University of Cape Town
in South Africa. Drongos get around this
dilemma by borrowing other species’
alarm sounds and varying what noise
they make in the scam, Flower and his
colleagues report in the May 2 Science.
Researchers in the arid Kalahari
region of South Africa recorded drongos,
each of which made 9 to 32 kinds of
BODY & BRAIN
Material induces
muscle regrowth
Noncellular pig tissue attracts
stem cells to fix injuries
BY NATHAN SEPPA
Badly injured patients can regrow lost
muscle with help from implanted sheets
of pig tissue. An experimental treat¬
ment worked well for three of five vol¬
unteers and showed some benefit in a
fourth, researchers report in the April 30
Science Translational Medicine.
“This is five patients, and that’s not
huge. But it’s a benchmark,” says George
Christ, a physiologist at Wake Forest
School of Medicine in Winston-Salem,
N.C. “It’s good to see studies out there
trying to address this huge gap in medi¬
cal knowledge and treatment.”
Large-volume losses of muscle don’t
12 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
alarm calls. The sounds unique to
drongos are “sharp and harsh and
grating,” Flower says. But the species
can also make 45 more sounds that
mimic other animals’ warning calls,
such as the piping or barks that meerkats
give when spotting danger. Drongos
often do give honest warnings of danger.
But when the birds steal
food, they mimic alarms of
other species more than 40
percent of the time, often
using the victim’s own
alarm. The mimicry works.
The researchers played
recorded alarms for birds
called pied babblers, a tar¬
get of the drongos’ fraud.
Mimicked alarm calls of
the babblers or of another
bird distracted the bab¬
Drongos perch near a
blers for longer than plain meerkat, perhaps readying
drongo alarms. their next cheat.
fully recover. To encourage regrowth,
the scientists used pig bladder tissue
with all of its cells removed, leaving a
sterilized matrix sheet of collagen and
other compounds common to mam¬
mals. Implanted in sites of muscle loss in
mice, the material gave off chemical sig¬
nals that attracted stem cells. The tissue
sheets also served as a scaffold on which
those cells grew and took on characteris¬
tics of muscle cells, says study coauthor
Brian Sicari, a researcher at the Univer¬
sity of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
A larger, multilayer version of this
scaffold was implanted in five men who
had lost muscle tissue in either the thigh
or lower leg and had endured physical
therapy and various surgeries to remove
scar tissue in failed attempts to regrow
lost muscle. Their injuries had occurred
one to seven years before the study.
“Most of these patients have been
through hell,” says coauthor Stephen
Badylak, a physician and researcher also
Variety also works. The same call lost
some of its power to fool the babblers
on the third iteration, the researchers
found. But switching that third phony
alarm to a different kind sent babblers
fleeing as swiftly as ever.
Analyzing 688 drongo attempts at theft
in the Kalahari revealed that the master
tricksters switch it up. Compared with
a drongo that has succeeded in scaring
away a forager with an alarm call, a bird
that has failed is more likely to switch to
a different call for the next attempt. And
switching made the next
attempt more than four
times as likely to succeed.
Documenting flex¬
ible deception in mim¬
icry like the drongos’ is
extremely unusual, says
behavioral ecologist Rose
Thorogood of the Univer¬
sity of Cambridge. Plenty
of organisms lie and cheat
for a living, but they face
limits on their foolery
that drongos have pushed
back. ■
at Pittsburgh. A day or two after under¬
going surgery to implant the scaffold
material at the injury site, all five went
into rigorous physical therapy. Such
movement, Badylak says, instructs stem
cells attracted to the scaffold’s chemical
cues that they should become muscle
cells. Biopsies of the implant site showed
muscle regrowth in all five patients.
Each patient also underwent tests of
everyday movements such as getting up
from a chair, standing balanced on the
injured leg with eyes closed, jumping on
that leg, squatting or reaching forward
and backward while standing. Three
patients passed all tests relevant to their
injuries 24 to 28 weeks after implanta¬
tion. Another patient passed six of seven
tests but failed a standing balance test.
COURTESY OF T. FLOWER
Although one patient experienced little
physical improvement, Badylak says
this is the first study to show this degree
of regrowth in multiple people with
extensive muscle loss. ■
Listen to drongos' mimicry at bit.ly/SN_drongos
 LIFE & EVOLUTION
Most extreme female penis is found on cave lice
Insect’s organ can be 15 percent the length of the body, extract sperm from males
BY SUSAN MILIUS
The most dramatic genital-shape
reversal known —females with long,
insertable organs and males with cor¬
responding pouches —has turned up in
bark lice living in Brazilian caves.
A female in each of four Neotrogla spe¬
cies extends a skinny structure up to 15
percent the length of her body to retrieve
sperm from the male’s body, reports
entomologist Kazunori Yoshizawa of
Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan.
Depending on the species, a female bark
louse can spend up to 70 hours extract¬
ing sperm. Males have penislike rem¬
nants but can’t deliver sperm with them.
Male sperm packages look as if they
could be nutritional bonanzas in dry
caves where the insects otherwise rely
on bat guano and the occasional carcass,
Yoshizawa says. The food value of sperm
may change the balance of various evo¬
lutionary pressures and end up favoring
the evolution of female penises and male
vaginas, the researchers suggest in the
May 5 Current Biology.
“Absolutely amazing,” said Menno
Schilthuizen of Leiden University in
the Netherlands after a first look at the
paper’s anatomical illustrations. The
4 .
Ill ' ^
/( s __1
COURTESY OF K. YOSHIZAWA
female organ, he says, “has even copied Yoshizawa says. “The Neotrogla female
the penis spines that are so common in penis is the spiniest.”
many male animals.” Neotrogla is a recent addition to the
Spines may help a female louse anchor world’s known insect genera, described
her organ inside the male, Yoshizawa in 2010 based on specimens collected
says. In three species, males have from harsh, dry caves in eastern Brazil
pouches, and bulging spots accommo¬ explored by Rodrigo Lopes Ferreira of
date the spines and may reduce damage the Federal University of Lavras in Brazil.
to the males. When the female inserts “They live in such a severe condition that
the structure, it inflates and remains only a few species can survive,” he says.
firmly attached. Once, when research¬ Its wow factor aside, Schilthuizen
ers tried to separate a calls the genital role
coupled pair, the male’s "The female organ reversal “important
body broke in two but has even copied the because it is the excep¬
male and female genitals tion that proves the rule
penis spines that
remained connected. of sexual selection.” How
The gripping power is
are so common in much each sex invests
just one of the features many male animals.” in reproduction affects
that distinguish the cave MENNO SCHILTHUIZEN how choosy that sex
louse penis from the is. If male cave lice are
few other known examples of insert- bundling a lot of their tiny sperm and
able female organs, Yoshizawa says. A extras into huge, nutritious packages in
female sea horse inserts a tube into a a nearly barren environment, the male
male’s pouch but she’s not retrieving could become the choosy one and the
sperm, just inserting eggs for the male to female the wanton and sexually more
fertilize and carry to term. Some female aggressive one.
scirtid beetles can push out a bit of the Striking as the cave lice are, he says,
ducts leading to their sperm-storage “there are still so many unstudied insects
organs, and female astigmatan mites out there that I wouldn’t be surprised if
extend a tube that is “quite long, actually,” more examples turn up sooner or later.” ■
|
A cross section of the genitals of Brazilian Neotrogla bark lice during sex
shows the plump curving protrusion of the female’s penis (orange) reaching
into a vaginalike pocket inside the male to collect his sperm. The female’s
organ is less than a millimeter long.
www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 13
NEWS IN BRIEF
HUMANS & SOCIETY
Students retain information
better with pens than laptops
When it comes to taking notes, the old-
fashioned way might be best. Students
who jotted down notes by hand remem¬
bered lecture material better than their
laptop-wielding peers did, researchers
report April 23 in Psychological Science.
People taking notes on laptops have a
shallower grasp of a subject than people
writing with their hands, and not just
because laptops distract users with other
activities such as web surfing, the new
study suggests. Students from Princeton
and UCLA watched videos of TED talks or
of a graduate student delivering a lecture.
Students who wrote in longhand before
a quiz performed better on conceptual
questions than did those who typed notes.
Pen users’ notes included around 100 to
150 fewer words than those of people
who typed and were less likely to include
what the lecturer said verbatim. The find¬
ing indicates that pen users reframed
concepts in a more meaningful way, the
authors suggest. - Laura Sanders
Massachusetts insurance
mandate lowers death rate
After 2006, when Massachusetts put in
place a policy aimed at universal health
insurance, mortality rates among those
affected by the law fell by 2.9 percent,
researchers report in the May 6 Annals of
Internal Medicine. The law, enacted when
Mitt Romney was governor, is widely
seen as a model for the national Afford¬
able Care Act, sometimes called Obama-
care. The Massachusetts law mandated
coverage and offered subsidized private
insurance and expanded Medicaid cover¬
age. Researchers compared mortality for
people ages 20 to 64 from 2007 to 2010
with death rates in the five years preced¬
ing the law's enactment. The 2.9 percent
decline was the average, with the great¬
est effect seen in previously uninsured
people. The researchers calculated that
Romneycare yielded one fewer death
for every additional 830 adults covered.
Greater coverage led to more clinic visits
resulting in better overall health, the
authors suggest. - Nathan Seppa
14 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
EARTH & ENVIRONMENT
Viruses buoy life at
hydrothermal vents
In the deep ocean, viruses have won safe
harbor through thievery. With stolen
genes that make sulfur-digesting enzymes,
viruses provide metabolic backup to
bacteria feasting on the sulfur plumes
of hydrothermal vents, researchers
propose May 1 in Science. Researchers
know little about the bacteria-infecting
viruses, called bacteriophage, that invade
sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. These bacteria
are key sources of energy for organisms
in hydrothermal vents. Geomicrobiologist
Gregory Dick of the University of Michi¬
gan in Ann Arbor and colleagues spotted
the genetic looters in samples from vents
in the western Pacific Ocean and the Gulf
of California. By sequencing DNA in each
sample, the team found the genomes of
sulfur-oxidizing bacteria and 18 types
of viruses. Fifteen of these viruses, the
researchers found, had snatched and held
onto bacterial genes involved in convert¬
ing elemental sulfur to sulfite, a step in
energy production that could bolster the
host bacteria's energy output. - Beth Mole
MATTERS ENERGY
Color-changing polymer
maps fingerprints
Sweaty lingers make tidy prints. Beads of
perspiration seeping from a person’s pores
can leave detailed maps of the fingertips
Listen to minke whales’ weird sounds at bit.ly/SN_bioduck
(one shown), and a new technique can
detect the sweat. Materials scientist Jong-
Man Kim of Hanyang University in Seoul,
South Korea and colleagues created
color-changing polymers that snap from
blue to red when they touch tiny droplets.
The polymer subunits look like teeny
tadpoles, with bulbous heads and skinny
tails. When packed tightly together, they
form stacked sheets that appear blue. But
water twists the crowded sheets apart,
making them absorb shorter wavelengths.
Pressing a finger to a polymer-coated
film instantly colored it with red dots,
Kim’s team reports April 29 in Nature
Communications. Kim thinks the polymers
could improve existing fingerprinting,
which analyzes impressions left by finger
ridges’ loops, arches and whorls. Pores
speckle these ridges, creating unique dot
patterns that match up with traditional
fingerprints. Forensics teams can pick up
10-year-old dots of sweat left on a piece
of paper, Kim says. - Meghan Rosen
LIFE & EVOLUTION
Submariners’ ‘bio-duck’
is probably a whale
It quacks like a duck, sort of. But the
mystery creature of the Antarctic is more
likely a whale. Submariners in the 1960s
recorded strings of quick heartbeat¬
like pulses and nicknamed the unknown
source a “bio-duck.” Whatever it is sounds
off mostly in winter and spring in the
Weddell Sea off Antarctica and the waters
off Western Australia. The sound is "way
too loud for a fish," says marine biologist
Denise Risch of Integrated Statistics in
Falmouth, Mass. Listeners have proposed
sources from military hardware to marine
mammals such as minke whales. Very little
is known about these whales’ vocaliza¬
tions. In 2013, researchers for the first
time placed acoustic tags on the Antarctic
minke (Balaenoptera bonaerensis). Over the
course of 18 hours, one of the tags picked
up bio-duck beats before and during a
whale’s feeding dive. Because researchers
COURTESY OF KIM ETAL
following the whales saw no other marine
mammals nearby, Risch and colleagues
conclude April 23 in Biology Letters that
minke whales are the bio-ducks.
-Susan Milius
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FEATURE:

The entrance to a black hole could reveal insights

into the Big Bang, the formation of galaxies and even
death by SpaghettiflCation ByAndrewGrant
A black hole’s event horizon is a one-way bridge to
nowhere, a gateway to a netherworld cut off from
the rest of the cosmos.
By studying the event horizon
through both theory and observa¬
tion, scientists could soon figure
The event horizon
is framed by the bright
ring in this black hole
simulation. Color repre¬
Understanding what happens at that pivotal out how the universe began, how sents the intensity of light
boundary could reveal the hidden influences that have molded it evolved and even predict its ulti¬ emitted by hot gas circling
the horizon; red is bright¬
the universe from the instant of the Big Bang. mate fate. They’d also be able to est, blue dimmest.
Today some of the best minds in physics are fixated on the answer a crucial question: Would a
event horizon, pondering what would happen to hypothetical person falling into a black hole be stretched and flattened like
astronauts and subatomic particles upon reaching the preci¬ a noodle, dying by spaghettification, or be incinerated?
pice of a black hole. At stake is the nearly 100-year quest to
unify the well-tested theories of general relativity and quan¬ Gravitational gusto
tum mechanics into a supertheory of quantum gravity. Scientists thought about the possibility of black holes and
But the event horizon is more than just a thought experi¬ event horizons long before either term existed. In 1783,
ment or a tool to merge physics theories. It is a very real fea¬ British geologist and astronomer John Michell considered
SCOTT NOBLE/RIT

ture of the universe, a pivotal piece of cosmic architecture that Newton’s work on gravity and light and found that, in theory,
has shaped the evolution of stars and galaxies. As soon as next a star with 125 million times the mass of the sun would have
year, a telescope the size of Earth may allow us to spot the edge enough gravitational oomph to pull in any object trying to
of the shadowy abyss for the first time (See sidebar, Page 20). escape — even one traveling at light speed.

16 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014

 Although stars can never attain that much mass, Albert
Einstein’s 1916 general theory of relativity put Michell’s hunch
about supermassive objects onto solid theoretical ground.
Later that year, German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild used
general relativity to show that some stars could collapse under
their own gravity and create a deep pit in the fabric of space-
time. Anything, including light, that came within a certain dis¬
tance of the collapsed star’s center of mass could
never come out. That point of no return became
known as the event horizon.
Confirmation for the existence of black holes
came decades later. In 1974, scientists detected a
heavy dose of radio waves emitted from the center
of the Milky Way, about 26,000 light-years away.
They eventually concluded that there must be a
Discovered in 1964,
black hole there. Today, astronomers know that
Cygnus X-l (seen here in
virtually every galaxy harbors a giant black hole X-rays) became the first
at its center, shaping the formation of millions astronomical object to be
classified as a black hole.
of stars and even neighboring galaxies with its
immense gravitational influence. Galaxies also contain mil¬
lions of small- and medium-sized black holes, each with an
event horizon past which light is never seen again.
But the repercussions of black holes’ extreme gravity even¬
tually led to conflicts with one of the keystones of 20th cen¬
tury physics: quantum mechanics. The trouble began in the
mid-1970s, when University of Cambridge physicist Stephen
Hawking proposed that black holes are not eternal. In the
far, far future, when black holes have devoured almost all the
matter in the universe, leaving little else to consume, energy
should slowly leak out from their event horizons. That energy,
now known as Hawking radiation, should continue seeping out
until each black hole evaporates completely.
Hawking quickly realized the drastic consequences of his
proposal. In a chaos-inducing 1976 paper, he explained that if
a black hole eventually disappears, then so should all the infor¬
mation about all the particles that ever fell into it. That violates
a central tenet of quantum mechanics: Information cannot
be destroyed. Physicists could accept that all the properties
of all the particles within a black hole were locked up, forever
inaccessible to those outside a black hole’s event horizon. But
they were not OK with that safe vanishing without a trace. “It
violated everything I knew about quantum mechanics,” says
Stanford theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, who heard
Hawking’s ideas at a conference in 1981. “It couldn’t be right.”
FROM TOP: CXC/SAO/NASA; JAMES PROVOST
Violating theories
Susskind dug into this black hole information paradox, and by
the turn of the century he thought he had resolved it with a pro¬
posal called complementarity. In essence, he argued that infor¬
mation can simultaneously cross the event horizon and never
cross the event horizon, so long as no single observer can see it
in both places.
If a particle were to fall into a black hole, an astronaut falling
alongside it would see nothing special happen as both coasted
across the event horizon and into the black hole’s interior. But
another astronaut watching from outside would never see his
friend or the particle pass the event horizon; from his point
of view, the particle would get perilously close to the horizon
but never quite cross it. Eventually, as the black hole evapo¬
rated perhaps a trillion trillion trillion trillion years later
(astronauts in thought experiments have remarkable longev¬
ity), the astronaut outside the black hole would
see the Hawking radiation associated with the
infalling particle.
Susskind’s explanation is unintuitive, but at
least it’s elegant. For both observers, informa¬
tion is preserved (SN: 9/25/04, p. 202). Plus, the
outside astronaut can potentially piece together
everything that fell into the vast black hole inte¬
rior just by monitoring the event horizon. This
idea, proposed by Juan Maldacena at the Institute
for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J., is called the
holographic principle: Just as a two-dimensional
hologram can depict a three-dimensional object, the surface of
a black hole theoretically reveals everything inside of it.
But in 2012, a quartet of physicists including Joseph
Polchinski from the University of California, Santa Barbara
reignited the black hole information paradox by demonstrat¬
ing that in solving one problem, Susskind and Maldacena had
created another. The issue centers on another facet of quan¬
tum mechanics called entanglement, which intertwines the
properties of multiple particles regardless of the distance
between them. Susskind and Maldacena’s complementarity
relies on entanglement to preserve information. As the pro¬
posal goes, particles of Hawking radiation are linked to each
other so that over time an observer could measure the radia¬
tion and piece together what’s inside the black hole.
In yet another thought experiment, Polchinski and his
team pondered what would happen if just one of a pair of
entangled particles near a black hole’s event horizon fell in,
while the other escaped as Hawking radiation. According to
complementarity, the escaping particle would also have to be
entangled with another Hawking particle. But that’s a no-no
in quantum mechanics: Particles entangled with each other
Stretching spacetime According to general relativity, the sun's
mass makes an imprint on the fabric of spacetime that keeps the planets
in orbit. A neutron star leaves a greater mark. But a black hole is so
dense that it creates a pit deep enough to prevent light from escaping.
Sun Neutron star Black hole
FEAT URE THE MYSTFRiOUS BOUNDARY

Pasta or Barbecue? Since the 1970s. physicists have had trouble coming up with a proposal that describes the fate
of something, or someone, falling into a black hole that doesn't violate well tested theories. Until 2012, complementarity
(left side of image) seemed to do the job It said that an astronaut falling into a black hole won t notice anything special as he
crosses the event horizon Yet someone outside will never see his friend reach the horizon. Information is preserved for both
observers. But complementarity breaks another rule of quantum mechanics (see Problematic entanglements, below right).
Some argue that walls of radiation along event horizons incinerate incoming matter (right side of image).

Complementarity
An astronaut falling into a black hole crosses the event horizon
without incident, satisfying a prediction of general relativity.
The astronaut continues floating along until, approaching the
black hole’s center, he is spaghettified.
Firewall
A wall of radiation incinerates the unlucky astronaut and blocks
entry into the black hole. Information is preserved in this scenario
(you can theoretically piece together the astronaut from his
ashes), but general relativity is violated.

Event horizon Firewall

Problematic entanglements
For information to be preserved, outgoing particles
of Hawking radiation have to be entangled (quan¬
tum linked) to each other. But for general relativity
to be correct, particles inside the black hole have to
be entangled with particles outside the black hole.
Unfortunately, these two entanglements can’t coexist,
Breaking one of the entanglements creates a firewall.

Problem Solution: Firewall

JAMES PROVOST

Event s*
horizon Firewall

18 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31.2014

outside a black hole cannot also be entangled with particles
inside the black hole. Physicists call this forbidden arrange¬
ment entanglement polygamy.
To remedy this violation of quantum theory, Polchinski’s
team took its thought experiment a step further and tried sev¬
ering the entanglement spanning the event horizon. The result:
An impenetrable wall of energy formed at the event horizon,
incinerating and shutting out any object big or
small that tried to pass. They called this unfor¬ The event horizon
giving boundary a firewall.
is where
Unfortunately, while the firewall would
play by the rules of quantum mechanics, it
gravity... rips off
would violate Einstein’s theory of general the Clark Kent
relativity. According to Einstein, an astro¬ business suit
naut should not notice anything unusual as he and starts
crosses the event horizon; in fact, he shouldn’t
to become
even know he’s crossed it until later, when
he begins getting spaghettified, or stretched as strong as the
like a noodle, from the extreme gravity of the other forces."
black hole’s interior and realizes that even SHEPERD DOELEMAN
a light-speed escape attempt would do no
good. A firewall, on the other hand, would provide a pretty
noticeable hint that the astronaut had reached the event
horizon: He would fry instantly. If firewalls exist, then general
relativity requires tweaking.
This firewall problem once again pits general relativity
against quantum mechanics, and it has sparked new interest
in thinking about the strange physics taking place at the event
horizon. “I don’t even see a good framework of an idea to solve
the problem,” Polchinski says.
Astronomical stakes
These thought experiments may seem academic, but the impli¬
cations go well beyond the fates of a handful of particles. Event
horizons seem to be the best theoretical test bed for combin¬
ing general relativity and quantum mechanics into a unified
theory of quantum gravity. “The last frontier for fundamental
physics is quantum gravity,” says Janna Levin, an astrophysi¬
cist at Columbia University’s Barnard College. “And this one
puzzle is offering us a chance to see the key elements.”
Physicists have had trouble developing a theory of quan¬
tum gravity because compared with the universe’s other
three forces — strong, weak and electromagnetism — gravity
is pathetically feeble. It’s the only force that is negligible at the
small scales dominated by quantum physics.
The quest for a theory of quantum gravity gained added
significance after the recent discovery of ripples in spacetime
dating back to a mere 10"36 seconds after the birth of the uni¬
verse (SN: 4/5/14, p. 6). Understanding the universe so soon
after the Big Bang is an amazing achievement, but a lot of
interesting stuff happened in that trillionth of a trillionth of
a trillionth of a second before those ripples cascaded through
the infant cosmos.
If physicists are ever going to reach all the
way back to the very beginning of the universe,
Levin says, they will have to understand how the
universe behaved when it was incredibly small
and incredibly massive simultaneously. The
best way to figure that out is to formulate a the¬
ory of quantum gravity by demystifying another
such compact, massive environment: a black
hole. “The event horizon is where gravity starts
to come into its own,” says Sheperd Doeleman,
an astronomer at MIT’s Haystack Observatory.
“It rips off the Clark Kent business suit and
starts to become as strong as the other forces.”
With so much at stake, many prominent physicists are step¬
ping up and throwing some intriguing ideas into the mix.
The all-star roster includes Hawking. In a brief, cryptic
January posting to the physics preprint server arXiv.org, he
suggested that event horizons are not the points of no return
proposed by Schwarzschild nearly a century ago. If event hori¬
zons occasionally allow stuff inside the black hole to escape.
Hawking argued, then firewalls need not exist. While Hawk¬
ing’s comments grabbed headlines —it didn’t hurt that his
write-up included the misleading phrase “there are no black
holes” — nobody is quite sure what the black hole savant has in
mind. “People want to know what Hawking thinks,” says Sabine
Hossenfelder, a cosmologist at the Nordic Institute for Theo¬
retical Physics in Stockholm. “But practically, his paper has no
use for me.” She wants Hawking to release a comprehensive
paper explaining his argument and the reasoning behind it.
Patrick Hayden, a Stanford quantum physicist, has an idea
similar to complementarity. He agrees with the arguments
laid out by Polchinski’s team but suggests that it would be
extremely difficult for a single observer to determine that a
particle is engaged in entanglement polygamy. In fact, he says
it would take a person so long to experimentally verify it that
the black hole would have already evaporated. Once again, it
may turn out that a black hole information paradox is allowed

Evolution of •- •- •- •- •- •-

black hole theories 1916 1974-1976 Late 1990s 2004 2012 2014
Black holes have given Einstein's general Hawking shows Complementa- Hawking accepts Polchinski etal Solutions put
physicists headaches theory of relativity that black holes rity, proposed Susskind and Juan say complemen- forth include
since Stephen Hawking lays a framework evaporate by physicist Maldacena’sasser- tarity violates fuzzy event
proposed his eponymous for existence of over time. That Leonard Susskind, tion that black holes rules of quantum horizons, a
radiation. A time line black holes, with means informa- temporarily preserve informa- entanglement. new take on
of proposals to pre¬ massive gravity. tion inside disap- solves the prob- tion. General relativ- Implication: a complemen-
vent black holes from Information stays pears. Physicists lem of informa- ity and quantum wall of fire at the tarity and
destroying information: safely locked inside. are baffled. tion loss. mechanics are safe. event horizon. wormholes.

www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 19

FEATURE THE MYSTERIOUS BOUNDARY
to exist for the simple reason that no one could ever detect it.
The most potentially paradigm-shifting idea comes from
the dogged duo of Susskind and Maldacena. They address the
firewall problem by combining entanglement, a mind-bending
facet of quantum mechanics, with the sci-fi-sounding concept
of wormholes. Wormholes are shortcuts through spacetime,
the rough equivalent of crossing a mountain via tunnel rather
than climbing over it. According to Susskind and Maldacena,
every pair of entangled particles is connected by a wormhole,
drastically shortening the distance between them.
Applying this to event horizons, they say that individual
particles of Hawking radiation are linked via wormhole to the
inside of the black hole. The proposal eliminates the need for
firewalls by turning entanglement into a shortcut through
spacetime rather than a mysterious long-distance link.
In essence, the particles inside and outside the event horizon
become one and the same.
Susskind and Maldacena’s proposal, while pretty wild, is
stirring cautious optimism. “As physicists, we often rely on our
sense of smell in judging scientific ideas,” Caltech theoretical
Picture perfect
With all the talk about hypothetical astronauts and entangled
particles, it's easy to forget that black holes are actual objects
in the universe. It may be up for debate whether matter
falling in gets stretched or burned, but there’s no doubt that
throughout the cosmos incalculable amounts of gas and dust
are flowing across the event horizons of black holes.
Astronomers know this because, despite the fact that no
light can escape the event horizon, many black holes are fairly
easy to detect. As the supergravity of a black
hole reels in gas and dust, a traffic jam
emerges near the event horizon. As matter
bumps into other matter, it heats up and
glows, emitting X-rays and other high-
energy radiation. “Black holes are sitting in
a luminous soup of billion-degree gas," MIT’s
Sheperd Doeleman says. Sometimes all that
searing gas rockets away from the black hole
in concentrated jets that can course more High-energy jets emanate from the
than a million light-years. central black hole of Centaurus A,
a galaxy 12 million light years away.
Astronomers aren’t sure why some galax¬
ies’ black holes are voracious eaters, glowing brightly, while
others seem dark and inactive, Doeleman says. The Milky
Way's central black hole, which weighs about 4 million times
the mass of the sun, is relatively dormant. Astronomers are
holding out hope that they’ll get to see the local black hole
light up over the next year as a large gas cloud called G2
swings perilously close to its event horizon (SN: 8/24/13, p. 9).
Doeleman has even greater ambitions. He leads a team
that plans to directly image the event horizon of the Milky
20 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
physicist John Preskill wrote on his blog Quantum Frontiers. “At
first whiff, [the wormhole proposal] may smell fresh and sweet,
but it will have to ripen on the shelf for a while.” If Susskind and
Maldacena are right, it would mean that quantum mechanics
determines not only the behavior of particles at very small scales
but also the large-scale structure of the universe. "Entangle¬
ment creates the hooks that hold space together,” Susskind says.
And in Susskind’s mind, that’s the beauty of the event hori¬
zon. A firewall proposal that he’s sure is wrong but can’t yet
explain why may be the ticket to unraveling the great myster¬
ies of the universe. Perhaps complementarity, wormholes or a
mystery mechanism up Stephen Hawking’s sleeve will simulta¬
neously rectify the black hole information paradox and deliver
a theory of quantum gravity. “Once in a while, a conflict comes
along and completely changes the way we think about things,”
Susskind says. “This firewall story maybe one of them.”*
Explore more
■ J. Preskill. "Entanglement = Wormholes.”
http://bit.ly/SNentanglement
Way’s central black hole. That’s pretty hard to do: In fact, it
requires a telescope the size of Earth.
So next year, Doeleman and his colleagues will unveil what
amounts to an Earth-sized telescope.
The Event Horizon Telescope, the first instrument designed
specifically for spying the structure of a black hole, combines
multiple radio telescopes to achieve a resolution equivalent to
that of a single one that is much larger (SN: 10/9/10, p. 22). This
ESO/WFI (VISIBLE); MPIFR/ESO/APEX/A.WEISS ETAL. (MICROWAVE); NASA/CXC/CFA/R.KRAFT ETAL. (X-RAY)
year, Doeleman is heading to the Atacama
La rge Mill imeter/su bmi 11 i meter Array in
Chile, the world’s most powerful radio tele¬
scope network, to install extraordinarily pre¬
cise atomic clocks that will allow researchers
to combine the Chilean telescopes’ data with
those from observatories in Hawaii, Spain
and eventually the South Pole.
If all goes well, as early as next year a
virtual telescope with the sensitivity of an
Earth-sized radio dish will deliver images
of a bright ring of hot gas surrounding a
circular shadow: the heart of a black hole, bounded by the
event horizon. “We’ve been working on this for a decade,”
Doeleman says. “It’s exhilarating to be so close."
Theorists aren’t as excited about the massive scope. After
all, an Earth-sized telescope can’t zoom in on a single particle
and resolve the information paradox. But perhaps a photo¬
graph will provide some inspiration. For the first time they’ll
be able to take a good look at the mysterious boundary that
has perplexed them for so long. - Andrew Grant
 At first and even second blush, you will think this is the famous
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BIG BABIES
High birthweight might signal health
risks later in life ByNathanSeppa
We all come into this world with sealed orders,
said 19th century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.
Although the great Dane lived at a time when much
of science was still gauzy and life events were often
ascribed to fate, the notion seems to hold true
today. A quick scan of newborn babies snoozing
in a maternity ward offers little hint of what their
futures hold.
But medical researchers are now unsealing
these orders by seizing on a simple clue — a new¬
born’s weight. Having established that being too
small at birth carries health risks down the road,
researchers are also finding that high birthweight
comes with baggage.
A stream of evidence has upended the long-held
assumption that a big baby is a healthy baby. New¬
borns pushing 9 pounds face an increased risk of
obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even
neurological problems over a lifetime. They are
High-birthweight more likely to run afoul of these conditions than
newborns, such
as this 4-day-old
are babies born in the “sweet spot” — not too big
19-pound baby and not too small.
(center) born to That much is clear, but details of how the tipped
a diabetic mother,
face health risks
scales lead to later disease are still being sorted
into adulthood. out. “High birthweight, in a way, is a proxy for a
22 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
whole bunch of things going on,” says David Hill, a
physiologist at the Lawson Health Research Insti¬
tute in London, Ontario. “It’s like a lighthouse.
You can see the light, but where are the rocks?”
Scientists suspect that high birthweight is a
marker for unwanted fetal programming. Stud¬
ies in animals suggest that too much nutrition
triggers a collage of changes in a fetus’ gene acti¬
vation, organ function and production of insulin
and other hormones. In a human pregnancy, these
changes conspire to make a newborn too large for
its own good.
The surge of big babies being born in the
decades following World War II has leveled off,
but about 8 percent of babies born in the United
States are still too big. The external forces driv¬
ing these births are apparent. In the past half-
century, the West has embraced a more sedentary
lifestyle and a diet larded with packaged and fast
foods. Today, nearly 50 percent of U.S. women
enter pregnancy either overweight or obese. And a
woman who is heavy before pregnancy, who gains
too much during those nine months or who has
diabetes is substantially more likely to have a big
baby than a nondiabetic woman who maintains a
healthy weight during gestation.
The good news is that some of the problem is
preventable, ideally through good prepregnancy
ANDI ANSHARI/AP PHOTO
health, controlled weight gain and exercise. But
that’s easier said than done. Many women still
consider a big baby a sign of good health even as
doctors are becoming more attuned to the risks of
high birthweight.
 Are the days of eating for two gone? “I certainly
hope they are,” says Emily Oken, a physician at
Harvard Medical School who works on women’s
health issues. In many cases, she says, “we think
they should be eating for 1.1.”
Metabolic mishaps
High birthweight is an informal classification
that starts at 4 kilograms (8.8 pounds) for West¬
ern newborns, black or white, and, some suggest,
3.5 kilograms (7.7 pounds) for Asian babies. This
doesn’t include big babies who are born to natu¬
rally big people. Doctors call these babies “consti¬
tutionally large,” says obstetrician Michael Ross
of the UCLA School of Medicine. These infants
are likely to be big-boned and long with plenty
of muscle, he says. The high-birthweight babies
to worry about are normal-sized newborns who
carry extra fat mass, he says.
Of course, all women should gain some weight
while pregnant. The Institute of Medicine, an
advisory panel to the U.S. government, set down
hard-and-fast ranges in 2009. Exceeding those
ranges or carrying extra weight can distort
mother-to-fetus communication.
“Fetus and mother are talking to each other
through the placenta,” says endocrinologist
David Phillips of the University of Southampton
in England. Nutrients such as glucose, fats, pro¬
tein components and a few hormones pass from
mom to fetus. “The mother is giving clues to the
fetus, which responds accordingly.”
This nutritional message includes lots of glu¬
cose, because all pregnant women experience
some insulin resistance in the last two trimesters.
Their cells resist insulin’s effects and become less
efficient at processing glucose for energy, leav¬
ing more of it available to the fetus, says Patrick
Catalano, an obstetrician at Case Western Reserve
University and MetroHealth Medical Center in
Cleveland.
But for some women, this process goes into over¬
drive. If a woman is obese or diabetic during preg¬
nancy, extra glucose passes through the placenta
and the baby gets too much fuel, says Catalano, who
served on the IOM panel. The same occurs if the
mom has gestational diabetes, a temporary kind of
diabetes that strikes only in pregnancy.
Inflammation may also boost this insulin resis¬
tance, says Fernando Guerrero-Romero, an inter¬
nist and research scientist at the Mexican Social
Security Institute in Durango. In obese women,
fatty tissues act as a source of immune proteins
called cytokines, which are chronic inflamma¬
Ideal weight gain In 2009, the Institute of Medicine updated guidelines for
weight gain during pregnancy, based on body mass index. The guidelines call for ample
weight gain in thin or normal-sized women and less in heavier women.
Prepregnancy Recommended Recommended
Body type
BMI (kg/m2) weight gain (lbs) weight gain (lbs/wk)*
Underweight <18.5 28-40 1(1-13)
Normal weight 18.5-24.9 25-35 1 (0.8-1)
Overweight 25.0-29.9 15-25 0.6 (0.5-0.7)
Obese >30.0 11-20 0.5 (0.4-0.6)
*Mean (range) for 2nd and 3rd trimester
SOURCE: INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE
tion signalers. Inflammation exacerbates insulin
resistance in a pregnant woman, he says. Insu¬
lin and some cytokines are too big to cross the
placenta barrier, but excess glucose does, leading
to an overfed fetus.
Women who are already obese before preg¬
nancy tend to deliver a nutritional mix that is
high in fats, Ross says. In women who gain excess
weight during gestation, it’s likely to be excess
glucose. “With a diabetic mother,” he says, “it’s
a little bit of everything.” Those extra nutrients
sent through the placenta trip hidden switches in
the offspring that can lead to higher rates of obe¬
sity much later. Some combination of this poor
nutrient mix “results in offspring with increased
appetite and increased predisposition to fat depo¬
sition,” Ross says. “They are just driven to store fat pounds
rather than break it down.” CDC benchmark for
low birthweight
It’s difficult to investigate how those changes
happen in human fetuses, since invasive tests are
out of the question. It’s also tricky to try to assign
pregnant women to experimental diets. But stud¬
ies in animals shed light on the impact of excess
pounds
nutrition in utero.
CDC benchmark for
Some show that a faulty nutritional mix can high birthweight
cause DNA modifications, known as epigenetic
changes, that modify genes and cells, sometimes
for the long term, Ross says. Being awash in glu¬
cose, for example, might alter stem cells in a fetus
as they change from nascent cells to cells with a
more clearly defined role. In animals, stem cells
with the blueprints to develop into the brain’s
neurons, for example, can be altered at key points,
steering a neuron away from being one that
induces satiety into one that provokes appetite.
Changes in the hypothalamus of the brain
during late pregnancy are involved “in the pro¬
gramming of appetite and metabolism toward
establishing an elevated body weight set point,”
Paul Taylor and Lucilla Poston of Kings College
London suggested in Experimental Physiology
in 2007.
www.sciencenews.orgl May 31,2014 23
FEATURE | BIG BABIES

Regardless of how overfeeding in utero causes
problems into adulthood, the consequences are
becoming clear.
In adults ages 24 to 45 in Finland who were
percent
part of a health study, those born big were twice
Fraction of U.S. women
who enter pregnancy as likely to become obese as those of average
overweight birthweight, scientists report in Arteriosclerosis,
Thrombosis and Vascular Biology in May. Another
study shows that being born heavy, even without
an obese mom, increases an adolescent’s risk of
obesity by 46 percent — implicating weight gain
percent in pregnancy.
Fraction of U.S. women Birthweight is also tied to diabetes risk.
who enter pregnancy Researchers at the University of Leipzig in Ger¬
obese
many found in an analysis of 1,117 children with
diabetes that these children had birthweights
that were strikingly higher or lower than those of
about 54,000 kids without diabetes.
percent
Too much glucose
Fraction of pregnant
women worldwide with The finding suggests that access to too much or
gestational diabetes too little glucose in utero contributes to type 1
diabetes. What’s more, women who were born big
are roughly twice as likely to develop gestational
diabetes during pregnancy as women who weren’t,
a Swedish team found in 2012.
The result of overnutrition in utero is mea¬
surable almost immediately. When scientists
at the University of Chile in Santiago examined
84 infant girls, they found that high-birthweight
girls had lower levels of adiponectin in the blood
than those with average birthweights. This hor¬
mone helps to regulate glucose levels and break
down fats. Low adiponectin is linked with insulin
resistance in animals and people.
In Mexico, scientists examined 107 newborns
and found that the 22 who were large, averaging
about 9 pounds, were more apt to have higher
blood levels of insulin, a sign of high blood glu¬
cose and insulin resistance, than average-weight
babies, says Guerrero-Romero, who reported the
findings in 2012 in BMC Pediatrics.
Brain puzzles
The impact of high birthweight goes beyond
metabolic problems to include neurological pre¬
dispositions that might be long-lasting. Tests in
animals have shown that an adverse prenatal
environment, whether due to overnutrition,
undernutrition or other events such as psycho¬
logical stress in the mother, can affect how the
brain develops.
Phillips in the U.K. teamed with researchers
in Finland in 2007 and found that adults who
were born at either high or low birthweight had
lower cortisol production during stress tests than
normal-birthweight people. Cortisol is a power¬
ful hormone with both beneficial and deleterious
effects. Out-of-balance cortisol levels could be a
sign of poor fetal programming, Phillips says.
He and his colleagues also tested elderly Brit¬
ons for stress reactivity. In a 2013 study, they
gave hundreds of people a standard stress test,
asking how they would react in uncertain social
situations. Answers to the questions can reveal
how a person is hardwired to react to stress, with
choices such as “I generally stay cool” or “I often
feel warm.” After accounting for other stressors
in the volunteers’ lives — recent and past — the
researchers found that both low- and high-birth¬
weight people reacted more strongly to stress
in old age than those born within the normal
weight range.
The ramifications of high birthweight might

Stacked deck
This chart shows
birthweights of
children and adoles¬
cents in relation to Z
<u
their diabetes status.
The zero horizontal
line marks a healthy
birthweight, which is
where nondiabetic
children clustered.
Kids who developed
diabetes were more
likely to have been <D

born big or small.

3
21
ni
SOURCE: V. KUCHLBAUER </>
ET AL/PEDIATRIC DIABETES 2013

• People with
E. OTWELL

diabetes
People without 0-5 5-10 10-20
diabetes Age in years

24 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014

 stretch beyond stress to schizophrenia. In another
Finnish study, people born at high-birthweight
were 68 percent more apt to be diagnosed with
schizophrenia than others their age, according
to the 2011 report in Psychiatry Research. The
authors suggest that a difficult delivery might play
a role, but they also note that gestational diabetes
could have been a contributing factor.
Cancer and heart disease
Scientists have known about a link between high
birthweight and childhood leukemia since the
1960s. Other malignancies now tied to high birth-
weight include brain, colon, breast and prostate
cancers in adulthood.
Less clear is the biology underpinning it all;
insulin may play a role here as well. Twenty years
ago Belgian researchers assessed fetal levels of an
insulin building block called C-peptide and two
growth factors called IGF-1 and IGF-2. Tests of
umbilical cord blood from newborns showed some
excess IGF-1 and C-peptide and very high levels
of IGF-2 in high-birthweight babies. That report
appeared in the American Journal of Obstetrics
and Gynecology.
In lab animals, increased IGF-1 hikes colon
cancer risk. Meanwhile, high insulin levels in the
blood show up in cancer patients, and insulin itself
seems able to promote tumor growth.
High birthweight might also contribute to can¬
cer risk by adding to an individual’s “stem cell
burden.” Because stem cells are self-renewing
and long-living, the stem-cell burden hypothesis
holds, having greater numbers of stem cells would
increase the odds of cancerous changes arising at
some point. Cristina Capittini and her colleagues
at the IRCCS Policlinico San Matteo Foundation
in Pavia, Italy, looked at stored umbilical cord
blood samples from 1,037 full-term infants and
tallied the population of stem cells, identifiable
by the protein CD34. Writing in Maturitas in
2011, they reported that heavier babies had sub¬
stantially more stem cells than average-weight or
low-weight newborns.
But in some ways the cancer link to high birth¬
weight appears to be an effect in search of a
cause. “Birthweight is a marker for something,”
cancer epidemiologist Julie Ross of the Univer¬
sity of Minnesota Medical School in Minneapo¬
lis asserted in a 2012 editorial in Pediatric Blood
Cancers. She suspects IGFs getting activated in
fetuses, and possibly altered levels of adiponectin
E. OTWELL
and other hormones, account for some of it.
Although the cancer danger is real, the overall
Risk factors High birthweight can be a sign of altered fetal
programming that can sabotage health later in several ways:
G-
Brain
High reactivity to
stress, elevated
schizophrenia risk
o
Heart
Thicker blood vessel
Pancreas walls in adulthood pose
Off-kilter insulin cardiac risk
o
production ups
diabetes risk
0 -
Bone marrow and stem cells
Fat cells
Changes prompt the
body to store fat and
Increased risk for leukemia lead to weight gain
and other cancers
risk is low. The added risk of childhood leukemia
resulting from high birthweight is around 25 per¬
cent, Julie Ross notes. Since the risk of developing
childhood leukemia is minuscule, she calculates
that high birthweight probably accounts for an
extra 8 cases per million people per year.
Heart disease is a lot more common than leuke¬
mia, and it might also get a leg up in utero. Heavy
newborns grow up to have slightly thicker carotid
artery walls, a risk factor for cardiovascular disease,
than those with a normal birthweight, Michael
Skilton, avascular physiologist at the University of
Sydney, and colleagues in Finland report in
May in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular
Biology. Regardless of whether the adults were
normal weight or overweight, if they were born big
they were more likely to have more vessel thicken¬
ing than if they weren’t.
Fast-forward
Having large babies has little precedence in
humans, says Michael Ross, because delivering
them safely was harder before the advent of mod¬
ern medicine. “Looking back over evolution, if you
had too large a baby, you and your baby died.”
The problem for thousands of years was more
likely too little nutrition, not too much. That may
be why the impact of obesity and high birthweight
shows up glaringly in cultures that historically
faced food shortages but have recently run head¬
long into a Western diet and lifestyle. Ontario’s
David Hill points to studies of native peoples in
the Canadian north who have seen obesity levels
soar in a generation or two.
“You hear accounts of the day the satellite
www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 25
FEATURE I BIG BABIES
Heart nemesis Thicker carotid vessels
Adults who were born
at high birthweight have
thicker carotid vessel
walls, regardless of their
current weight. A thicker
intima-media, the inner¬
most two layers of the
vessel, is a warning sign
for heart disease.
SOURCE: M.R. SKILTON ETAL/
ARTERIOSCLEROSIS, THROMBOSIS,
AND VASCULAR BIOLOGY
Adult weight
dish came to town,” Hill says. “Before that, kids
ran about and played, then went home tired and
slept.” Now, adults and children alike watch televi¬
sion and consume foods that are often less healthy
than what they had before. This lifestyle change is
coinciding with higher birthweights in Cree Indian
babies in Northern Canada, who are naturally big.
A survey published in the January/February 2011
American Journal of Human Biology found that
nearly 37 percent of Cree Indian newborns were
high birthweight, higher than the 30 percent rate
found in 1969.
A generational effect shows up in Cree girls.
Those born at high birthweight in recent decades
have been more likely to grow up obese and remain
that way during their pregnancies, Hill says. They
are more apt to develop gestational diabetes when
they get pregnant and more likely to pass meta¬
bolic risks to their offspring.
Studies of the Pima Indians in Arizona show a
similar trend. In the past, they led a spartan life
with long stretches of scant food, Catalano says.
The people who survived passed on their “thrifty
genes,” he says, which store fat efficiently for hard
times — but can be detrimental in a modern world
of abundance.
“It’s a vicious cycle,” says Guerrero-Romero.
When he and his colleagues did their study in
Mexico testing infants’ umbilical cord blood,
they had to enroll 800 pregnant women to find
150 who were normal weight. “Obesity is a
problem in Mexico,” he says, “and I don’t think
there is a simple answer to the problem of high
birthweight.”
What’s a mother to do?
High birthweight would seem an implacable
foe, “sealed orders” that can’t be rescinded. But
moms-to-be have some degree of control over
their children’s fate. Michael Ross suggests that
26 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
women lose weight in anticipation of pregnancy.
But he acknowledges that roughly half of the preg¬
nancies in the United States are unplanned, and
prepregnancy counseling is uncommon.
That leaves controlling weight gain during ges¬
tation and exercising. When 47 pregnant women
were randomly assigned to spend up to 40 min¬
utes a day on a stationary bicycle as part of a trial
in New Zealand, the children born to the cycling
women were slightly smaller (but not under¬
weight) than babies born to 37 pregnant women
not given a stationary bike. The babies of the exer¬
cising mothers also scored better on tests of IGF-1
and IGF-2 than the other babies, according to the
2010 report in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinol¬
ogy & Metabolism.
To protect offspring from arterial thickening
that can lead to heart disease, Skilton suggests
that pregnant women control their cholesterol
as much as possible, ideally by diet rather than
with medication. For very obese women, pre¬
pregnancy bariatric surgery can lead to weight
loss, lower blood glucose and even an end to type
2 diabetes (SN: 9/10/11, p. 26). While drastic, such
an approach has been shown to benefit offspring.
A U.S.-Canadian team compared the school-age
weights of children born to 113 obese women who
had undergone bariatric surgery. The women had
a total of 45 children before surgery and 172 after
the operations. The kids born post-surgery were
half as likely to be obese during their school years
as the others, the researchers reported in Pedi¬
atrics in 2006.
“The majority of women are very receptive to
the idea that they are responsible for the future
health of their babies,” Hill says. But some don’t
understand the risks. A 2013 report from Austra¬
lia found that women had poor knowledge of the
risks of being overweight in pregnancy. In a sur¬
vey of pregnant women delivering at MetroHealth
in Cleveland, Catalano found that at least half of
overweight and obese women were gaining more
than the IOM recommended amounts.
Education can help break this cycle, Hill says.
“You can set a whole generation on a good trajec¬
tory.” Intervention before and during pregnancy
would help, he says, “but how effective you will be
probably depends on how early you start.” ■
Explore more:
■ S.A. Hopkins et al. "Exercise training in preg¬
nancy reduces offspring size without changes
in maternal insulin sensitivity." Journal of Clinical
Endocrinology & Metabolism. May 2010.
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 MUSEUM
Making child's
play of math
Few equations confront a visitor to
the National Museum of Mathemat¬
ics on Manhattan’s East 26th Street.
Instead, museumgoers find children —
and adults — riding the Coaster Roller
(below), a small platform that offers a
surprisingly smooth ride over acorn¬
shaped balls. (The trick lies in the
objects’ diameter, which is the same
in every direction.)
This physical, tactile, even rambunc¬
tious presentation of math is inten¬
tional, says museum cofounder Glen
Whitney. Too many people think math
is “boring, useless, too hard, irrelevant,
stifling, something that people don’t
use,” says Whitney, a former math pro¬
fessor and hedge fund analyst. He wants
to show people “the breadth and the
28 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
Square wheels roll with ease on a
geometrically designed track at the
National Museum of Mathematics.
beauty and the creativity that are inher¬ For those explicitly seeking math
ent in mathematics.” education, electronic screens scattered
The museum, also known as MoMath, around the museum’s two floors offer
seems to be succeeding. School groups “More Math” lessons explaining under¬
come through in waves. Preteen boys lying concepts such as why square¬
execute Dance Dance Revolution-style wheeled trikes require a track with
moves on a lighted grid where ever- bumps shaped like upside-down cat¬
shifting lines display the enary curves. But at times
shortest path connect¬ “We hope that the explanations can
ing everyone on the floor. by inspiring, we frustrate. Case in point:
High school students inspire education) Each glowing orb in the
compete to see how many exhibit “Harmony of the
CINDY LAWRENCE
magnetic monkey shapes Spheres” plays a different
they can tessellate, or link together. At chord when touched, but the text does
the Enigma Cafe no coffee is served, but little to illuminate how music relates to
plenty of geometrical games are; players math or why certain chords sound more
are encouraged to sit and solve together. pleasing. “String Product,” a two-story
Opened in late 2012, MoMath is a parabola meant to illustrate an early
high-tech, high-concept playground. calculator, is hard to decipher. And the
It is also the only math museum in the decision to forgo traditional signage
United States, where students’ poor can force visitors to alternate between
performance on international tests has interacting with an exhibit and tapping
inspired much hand-wringing among on a touch screen several feet away.
politicians and educators. Largely for For most visitors, though, these
this reason, the museum particularly occasional annoyances may not detract
targets kids in grades four through eight, much. “I just want to make sure they’re
a group known for finding math uncool. exposed to math as something fun,”
Still, cofounder Cindy Lawrence, a for¬ said one visitor, while her young sons
mer accountant and curriculum devel¬ explored a geometric proof of the
oper, stresses that the museum’s goal is Pythagorean theorem.
not to replace classrooms. And lest you think math games are
“Do I think MoMath in and of itself is just for kids, another mom put that
BOTH: MOMATH
going to raise grades around country? notion to rest: “I think my husband and
No,” Lawrence says. “We hope that by I have more fun than they do.”
inspiring, we inspire education.” — Gabriel Popkin
For museum hours and admission, visit http://momath.org
 BOOKSHELF Stuff Matters
The Amoeba in the Room Mark Miodownik
From the reason glass is
Lives of the Microbes clear to what makes choc¬
Nicholas P. Money
The' Amoobfl in the Room olate melt in your mouth,
Vos of thfi
Prochlorococcus is a little bacterium with a big job. you’ll find answers to all
Less than a micrometer in diameter, it’s the most abun¬ your questions about
dant photosynthetic organism on Earth, taking up carbon material science, plus some you’ve never
dioxide and releasing oxygen. If the octillion - that’s a 1 thought of. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26
followed by 27 zeros — or more Prochlorococcus currently
adrift in the world’s oceans were to disappear, writes mycologist Nicholas The Soil Will Save Us
Money, air-breathing animals would suffocate. Kristin Ohlson
For far too long. Money argues, biology textbooks have focused on life that’s Rebuilding soil damaged
visible to the naked eye. But the soil, seas and air abound with tiny living things by agriculture and urban¬
that cycle nutrients and form the base of a food web supporting more familiar ization can help to clean
life-forms. Even the human gut teems with unseen hitchhikers. Money’s up waterways, reduce car¬
book offers a glimpse into the lives of these often overlooked bacteria, fungi, bon emissions and lessen
amoebas and other microbes. flooding, a journalist argues in a passion¬
And what dramatic lives they lead. Money recounts brutal struggles between ate defense of "dirt.” Rodale, $23.99
predator and prey, unusual methods of reproduction and seemingly unlikely
alliances forged between species, all playing out under the microscope. The Extreme
The cast is colorful, too, from armored amoebas to bacteria that withstand Life of the Sea
blasts of radiation more than a thousand times the dose that would kill a Stephen R. Palumbi and
human. One interesting oddball is the dog lichen, a leafy-looking organism Anthony R. Palumbi
that’s actually a three-way team-up between an alga, a bacterium and a fungus, Marine biologist Stephen
all working together to ensure mutual survival. Palumbi and his son, a
Microbes are rarely allotted cute and easy-to-remember common names, so writer, team up to describe
keeping up with the terminology in the book can be a mental workout. Money’s the fastest, deepest and other outliers of
light-hearted writing helps prevent the lingo from becoming overwhelming, ocean life. Princeton, $27.95
though, and readers who can weather the tricky language will find a fascinating
Buy Books Reviews on the Science News website
and strange new world. —Allison Bohac include Amazon.com links that generate funds for
Oxford Univ., $24.95 Society for Science & the Public programs.

BOOKSHELF
The Sound Book
The Science of the Sonic Wonders of the World
Trevor Cox
Most lists of the world’s wonders include visually stunning
attractions — the Grand Canyon or the pyramids of Giza,
for example. Yet there’s more to life than meets the eye, as
acoustic engineer Trevor Cox reveals in this international
tour of aural amazements.
Many of the marvels Cox describes are architectural, from
domes and “whispering galleries” that
The Science of ike Sonic
Wonder* of the World
reflect and focus even the tiniest mur¬
murs to the most reverberant place in
the world: a four-story-deep subterra¬
nean tank in Scotland that was built to
hold strategic oil reserves during World
War II. The echoes inside the tank are
so strong and last so long because oil
Trevor Cox
has soaked into the concrete walls,
filling any pores where sound waves could infiltrate and be
absorbed rather than reflected.
The author also visits natural wonders such as the singing
sands of California’s Kelso Dunes and the Stalacpipe Organ
of Virginia’s Luray Caverns, where cave formations are
tapped like a huge xylophone to make musical tones. In vari¬
ous field experiments, Cox attempts to dispel the old wives’
tale that “a duck’s quack doesn’t echo.” (He’s ultimately
unsuccessful, but that’s because of the sites he’s chosen
and not due to any supernatural characteristics of the
waterfowl’s vocal cords, he suggests.)
Throughout this charming book, Cox calls upon physics
and the neuroscience of hearing to explain everything from
how engineers successfully tweak the acoustics in concert
halls to why it’s so hard to hear in noisy restaurants.
From its first page to its last, The Sound Book invites
readers to close their eyes and open their ears to the
sounds, both normal and peculiar, that surround us all.
— Sid Perkins
Norton & Co., $26.95

www.sciencenews.org | May 31,2014 29

FEEDBACK
Building a better vaccine
A whooping cough vaccine introduced
in the 1990s has fewer side effects than
its predecessor, but it may not protect
against the disease as well, Nathan Seppa
reported in "Whooping cough bounces
back" (SN: 4/19/14, p. 22). The old vaccine
used whole cells of the pertussis bacterium,
while the new acellular vaccine uses only
components of the disease-causing cells.
Vaccinations are a hot-button topic,
with some parents worried about pos¬
sible side effects and others worried
about the spread of illness from unvac¬
cinated kids. Reader response to the
APRIL 19,2014
whooping cough story reflected this
growing unease. “Here’s a novel idea:
Give parents a choice of which vac¬
cine to use,” wrote Kim Dominguez
on Facebook. “Many would choose the
ots 0 more effective one. Anyone who has
seen someone suffer with whooping
cough would choose to take the ben¬
efits of vaccination over the potential
risks.”
Dose Age Ted Grinthal suggested a combina¬
First 2 months tion of both vaccines: “I wonder if we
Second 4 months can have the best of both worlds. Would
it be effective to use the acellular vac¬
Third 6 months
cine for the first three shots — until the
Fourth 15-18 months
child is 18 months old — and then give
Fifth 4-6 years the old whole-cell vaccine? That way,
To keep whooping cough at bay, we’d avoid the unpleasant side effects
the Centers for Disease Control and until the children and parents are more
Prevention recommends that children
able to deal with them.”
receive five doses of the acellular
pertussis vaccine by age 6, on the Pediatrician Stanley Plotkin, who
schedule above, source: cdc helped develop the rubella vaccine, cau¬
tions that scientists don’t know whether
using the vaccines together would pro¬
vide the needed protection. “The use of
the whole-cell vaccine after the initial
vaccination in the first year of life might
be a good idea, but we don’t know yet if
that would correct the immunological
defects of the acellular vaccine. And I
Join the conversation
E-MAIL editors@sciencenews.org doubt if American parents will accept
MAIL Attn: Feedback the reactions, even later in life. I do
1719 N St., NW not doubt that the whole-cell vaccine
Washington, DC 20036
would be effective if enough doses were
Connect with us given, but I think the way forward is to
improve the acellular vaccine. The acel¬
lular vaccine does protect infants when
t * ®
given in the first years of life; it just
doesn’t protect long enough.”
30 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
On shaky ground
New early warning networks could provide
alerts a few seconds before earthquakes
hit, as Alexandra Witze described in
"Buying time" (SN: 4/19/14, p. 16). These
systems work by detecting the primary
seismic waves, or P waves, that arrive be¬
fore the more damaging secondary waves.
Reader David Reynolds e-mailed the
story of his frightening experience with
a magnitude 9.2 earthquake, the second
largest in recorded history, which led
him to believe P waves could help pro¬
vide early warnings. “I was at the corner
of 15th Avenue and Juneau Street in
Anchorage when the Good Friday quake
struck in 1964. A week after the quake,
I was working in an office with about 20
other people at Ft. Richardson when,
without saying anything, everyone in
the office suddenly jumped to their feet
and started running out of the build¬
ing. No noticeable shaking had started.
About 15 or 20 seconds later, we had
a 7.5 aftershock. Although none of us
knew what we were experiencing at the
time, I’m sure now that we must have
been sensing the P waves.”
People can absolutely feel P waves,
says Witze. “Trained seismologists in
particular can detect them and they
will start counting as soon as they feel
them, to determine the seconds elapsed
until the secondary waves arrive. This
allows the researchers to calculate a
rough distance to the epicenter.”
The kangaroo solution
In “Kangaroo gut microbes make eco-
friendly gas” (SN: 4/19/14, p. 10), Beth
Mole described how bacteria called ace-
togens in the marsupials’guts outcompete
methane-producing microbes, minimizing
kangaroo’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“If cattle could tolerate a move to
acetonic bacterial fermentation, we
could revolutionize American beef pro¬
duction,” John Turner wrote online.
“Otherwise, why not cultivate red kan¬
garoos instead? They’re no less native
to North America than our present
beef cattle. We’d just need some seri¬
E. OTWELL
ous stock fences, rather Jurassic Park-
looking ones.”
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Virtual universe reconstructs over 13 billion years of history
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch,” said Carl
Sagan, “you must first invent the universe.” A new simula¬
tion of the universe’s evolution, called the Illustris Project,
is a start. Led by Mark Vogelsberger, an astrophysicist at
MIT, Illustris is the most detailed and comprehensive
simulation of the universe to date and produces a cosmos
that looks similar to today’s. “The only way we can learn
about the universe is to observe it through telescopes,”
Vogelsberger says. The way to test ideas about its evolution,
he adds, is to build simulations. One of the simulation’s
insights, reported in the May 8 Nature, is the role that
32 SCIENCE NEWS | May 31,2014
supermassive black holes must have played in shaping
galaxies. As the behemoths swallow gas, they can belch out
energetic gas bubbles (orange) that span hundreds of thou¬
sands of light-years. Without these eruptions, the universe
would look different: Galaxies (pink, along blue filaments of
ILLUSTRIS COLLABORATION
dark matter) would be larger. Illustris tracks 12 billion grid
cells in a cube nearly 350 million light-years on a side as the
universe evolves from 12 million years after the Big Bang
to the present. Running the simulation required 19 million
central processing unit hours, or the equivalent of more
than 2,000 years on one processor. — Christopher Crockett
Watch a video of the evolving universe at bit.ly/SNuniverse
 THE
.Biology: The Science o f Life

T Taught by Professor Stephen Nowicki

DUKE UNIVERSITY

LECTURE TITLES
1. The Scope of “Life” 38. Hormones in Animals
2. More on the Origin of Life 39. What is Special
3. The Organism about Neurons?
and the Cell 40. Action Potentials
4. Proteins—How Things and Synapses
Get Done in the Cell 41. Synaptic Integration
5. Which Molecule and Memory
Holds the Code? 42. Sensory Function
Science 6. The Double Helix 43. How Muscles Work
& Mathem 7. The Nuts and Bolts 44. The Innate Immune
of Replicating DNA System
8. The Central Dogma 45. The Acquired
9. The Genetic Code Immune System
10. From DNA to RNA 46. Form and Function
11. From RNA to Protein in Plants 1
12. When Mistakes Happen 47. Form and Function
13. Dividing DNA Between in Plants II
Dividing Cells 48. Behavior as an
Professor Stephen Nowicki 14. Mendel and His Adaptive Trait
Duke University Pea Plants 49. Energy and Resources
15. How Sex Leads in Living Systems
to Variation 50. How Energy is
16. Genes and Chromosomes Harnessed by Cells
17. Charles Darwin and 51. Enzymes—Making
“The Origin of Species” Chemistry Work in Cells
18. Natural Selection 52. Cellular Currencies
in Action of Energy
19. Reconciling Darwin 53. Making ATP—Glycolysis
and Mendel 54. Making ATP—Cellular
20. Mechanisms of Respiration
Evolutionary Change 55. Making ATP—The
21. What Are Species and Chemiosmotic Theory
How Do New Ones Arise? 56. Capturing Energy
22. More on the Origin from Sunlight
of New Species 57. The Reactions of
23. Reconstructing Evolution Photosynthesis
24. The History of 58. Resources and .
Life, Revisited Life Histories
25. From Cells to Organisms 59. The Structure of
26. Control of Gene Populations
Expression 1 60. Population Growth
27. Control of Gene 61. What Limits
Expression II Population Growth?
28. Getting Proteins to 62. Costs and Benefits
the Right Place of Behavior
29. Genetic Engineering 63. Altruism and Mate
and Biotechnology Selection
30. How Cells Talk—Signals 64. Ecological Interactions
and Receptors Among Species
31. How Cells Talk—Ways 65. Predators and
That Cells Respond Competitors
32. From One Cell to Many 66. Competition and the

Master the Most 33.

34.
in an Organism
Patterns of Early
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Determination and
67.
68.
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Energy in Ecosystems
Nutrients in Ecosystems
How Predictable Are
Differentiation Ecological Communities?

Important Science 35.

36.
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Genes and Development
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71.
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